Corporate Training

When I was the Director of Training with an industrial services firm, I was tasked with training our field technicians and supervisors on the safe work processes and procedures of their field tasks in "water blasting" and "liquid vacuum truck" work. Both of these work scopes are extremely dangerous and takes years to become expert in. 

As you can imagine, a "corporate suit" coming to train the experienced field hands was never received well. I would invariably show up and was met with very "old school" and quite defensive, in some case combative attitudes. We integrated many barrier-breaking techniques into the training, but one of the techniques that had was most successful was one that you intimate in your discussion topic above. 

The best use of the combative, old school, "you can't teach me anything new" trainees was to weave them into the training as facilitators. This had a two-fold effect. First, it used their experience to help train the newer folks, which helped the transfer that knowledge to their charges AND helped them become better facilitators. But it also helped with their buy-in into the class. As I wrote to Matt in a previous reply to a discussion, once a trainee has had to train others on a topic, they become far better advocates. By subtly making these more combative trainees into trainers and facilitators we were basically extinguishing their defensiveness all together, and making a better all-around training environment. 

We used this technique for years and we were always very happy with it. It may not be exactly what you're looking to do, but from my perspective, this little technique was a gold mine in creating a better learning environment.